The Galil is generally considered to be one of the best AK variants ever created, standing right up there with the Finnish Rk95. It was adopted by a number of Central/South American militaries, and South Africa. It even came rather close to becoming Sweden’s service rifle instead of the FNC. Yet, with regards to Israeli military service, it’s the equivalent of the US experience with the M14: phased in, and then phased out in rapid succession.

What happened? I’ve been shooting the Galil for a couple years now, and I have some thoughts on the subject…

Continue reading Why the Galil failed →

I have no idea how I missed this, but the Forgotten Weapons blog has an excellent post up about the FFV-890C. The FFV-890C was the Galil variant submitted for the Swedish service rifle trials in the latter part of the 1970’s, which the FNC eventually wound up winning.

Most of the modifications are nothing terribly special, but the case deflector on the dust cover was a clever idea. The cross-bar safety on model 2 is just flat-out weird, though… seems like they should have just gone to the drawing board and redesigned the entire selector system.

Speaking of which, there’s one other Galil variant out there that doesn’t get a lot of discussion: the Bernardelli Mod.378 VB-SR. This was license manufactured by Bernadelli in Italy. The only major user is the Italian national police SWAT force, NOCS, although I’ve also read that the Italian Army also uses it for M203-equipped soldiers/grenadiers. The major improvement is that it was sometimes manufactured to use standard AR-15 mags. I’ve heard rumor that other things may have been changed, but I’ve never seen a list or any solid info.

As I mentioned in a previous post, “standardization” is not a virtue the IDF seems to put a lot of stock in as a military.  It is not uncommon to see many different sorts of Colt M16s in the IDF, ranging from model 603 M16A1s and model 653 CAR-15s to M16A2s and relatively-new M4 carbines.

But one common M16 variant in the IDF was never sold by Colt at all, and is a product of Israeli experiences with urban warfare: the Menusar.

Continue reading IDF M16 Variants: Menusar →

The list of every Israeli-made handgun I know of. Feel free to add ones I missed in the comments. I deliberately avoided listing all of the variants in this post; even just figuring out all the basic models has been challenging.

Continue reading The Complete List of Israeli-Manufactured Handguns →